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A beautiful, well-refined Android smartphone phone finds itself — and its manufacturer — fighting against the current once again.
There's a great exchange in an episode of The West Wing in which a political operative played by the late Ron Silver explains the delicacy involved in removing a piece of kelp from a perfectly shaped racing boat. There's a fine balance between removing what's...

In 2014, Motorola gave everyone who cares about how much smartphone you can get for $120 something to be excited about. Perhaps more important is that the company demonstrated there is a right and wrong way to address the budget phone market, and most of the players in this space had absolutely been doing things wrong.
Enter the original Moto E.
That, however, was last year. Within the last...

When we talk about the major Android manufacturers, we tend to talk the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola and Sony. Huawei usually doesn't enter the conversation until the low-cost, prepaid market. An afterthought, for those of us who spend too much time playing in the high-end.
We come by it honestly, of course, but we've also been missing out on some rather compelling devices. But 2015...

The Galaxy S5 was hardly a flop. Tens of millions have sold since its introduction last year and you’d be hard-pressed not to see one in use on the street in any populous city around the world. But despite its success relative to other devices in the market, the prevailing feeling about the GS5 is that it didn’t live up to the expectations of a flagship smartphone in 2014. Those shoes were...

It's big. It's bendy. But should you buy it?
The original LG G Flex was a unique, quirky phone that grabbed headlines back in late 2013, being the first flexible Android handset to hit the mainstream market. It was also a device of many compromises — an unwieldy 6-inch form factor, a lackluster 720p display resolution and iffy rear camera. It was an interesting technical showcase, if not a...

Everything has to be smarter these days. Connected to something. Connected to everything. And these days we have to talk to those things.
Google brought us, well, Google Now. But excellent as it is, you're taking to a machine. Apple personified things with Siri. And now Amazon has Alexa in its Amazon Echo Bluetooth speaker. Why? Oh, why not. On one hand you've got a decent speaker that ties...

The Blu Vivo Air is something of a paradox. This phone approaches the technical limit of how thin we can make a modern smartphone. It's not the absolute thinnest phone, no, that race is ongoing with successive manufacturers cutting their phones down fractions of a millimeter at a time to claim the latest title. But it is still very thin — thinner than any mainstream flagship device you'll find...

The first real, shipping Tizen phone is basic — very basic
With the explosive success of Samsung's Galaxy line of Android phones, the Korean giant's symbiotic relationship with Google has been the subject of much speculation within the mobile industry. Just as Samsung is reliant on Google for the software behind its smartphones, Google's services are viewed by many users through the lens of a...

One of the more exciting pieces of consumer hardware to come out of CES 2015 wasn't from the usual Android suspects. Not Samsung. Not HTC or Motorola or LG or even ASUS.
Nope. In 2015, we welcome Dell back to the Android stage with an awkwardly named but very-much-a-player Venue 8 7840 tablet — which you'll also see referenced as the Venue 8 7000 Series.
The broad strokes — it's an extremely...

Meet YotaPhone's second attempt to make a dual-screen smartphone. YotaPhone 2 is AMOLED in the front, ePaper in the back, and has just enough software to make both sides completely unique without crossing the line into what we all too commonly refer to as bloatware. It's a worthy successor to the original YotaPhone in every way, but more than that it makes a compelling case for having and using...

The first device in the new-for-Europe Honor brand mixes high-end specs and an affordable price point
Huawei's continued push in Europe has recently seen the launch of the Honor brand, and with it the Honor 6. It's an interesting proposition, in so much as it's offering a high-end Android smartphone at a low price thanks to avoiding carrier partnerships. The Honor 6 is available through Amazon...

HTC's little handheld camera … thing
HTC's dabbled in non-smartphone electronics before, primarily speakers, but the HTC RE Camera is without a doubt one of the weirdest and most beyond HTC's comfort zone. This is the HTC that famously put just a 4-megapixel camera in its flagship HTC One M8 smartphone, so a little handheld camera with a 16MP sensor? That's different.

Selfie. The first time I heard the word I paused. Do we really need a term for taking a photo of yourself at arm's length with a crappy front-facing camera? (I may have used stronger language). That was a few years ago. Today the term has exploded in use, and smartphone cameras aren't quite so little and crappy anymore, but I still hate even reading the word, much less using it. It's spawned...

Android Wear gains standalone GPS in a watch that mostly favors function over form
When it comes to smartwatches, you can sort of break things down into three camps. There's the rubber strap crowd — functional, but not all that stylish. There's leather, which classes things up a good bit but doesn't necessarily work on every watch. And then there's those who prefer a steel bracelet.
I've...

Combining a wearable item that so many people use with a technology fewer people are using every day
Wearables, fitness trackers and smartwatches are all the rage, and Huawei wasn't to be left in the dust when it announced the TalkBand B1. Yes it's a fitness band, with a companion app that tracks your steps, calories and sleep — but one little extra thing the TalkBand does (tipped by its name...

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